Today, two reformations. The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our civilization
run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

We
have this pretty shrub in our back yard. The flowers
morph from purple through violet to white. Its common name is
yesterday-today-and-tomorrow. But its formal Latin name is Brunfelsia
-- after Otto Brunfels. Brunfels was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1489 --
a time when two huge revolutions were surfacing:

Users of the new printing presses were just starting to include block-printed
visual information in their books. They were creating the first universal
descriptions of reality. At the same time, we heard the first rumblings of
the Protestant Reformation.

Together, these revolutions were about to shift Earth on its axis. And they were
powerfully interwoven, as we see when we trace Otto Brunfels' brief 45-year lifetime.

He was educated at the University of Mainz. Then he joined a Catholic monastery in
Strasbourg. While he was there, Luther nailed his 95 theses to the
Schlosskirche
door. Four years later, a Protestant firebrand named Ulrich von Hutten helped influence
Brunfels to leave the Catholic Church. Brunfels became pastor of one of the new
Protestant churches. And he married.

After three years of parish work, he returned to Strasbourg and opened a school.
There he wrote on theology. His old mentor von Hutten had become increasingly aggressive
in his support of Luther. Von Hutten had once been a friend of
Erasmus, but he launched a scathing
exchange of tracts with Erasmus after he failed to talk him into leaving the Catholic
Church. Brunfels joined that nasty exchange by writing in defense of von Hutten.

By the way, Stanford University's motto
is a line by von Hutten: Die Luft der Frieheit weht -- The Wind of Freedom Blows.
Before WW-I, America began replacing Latin with German in academia, those words seemed apt.
But even before von Hutten's winds of freedom began blowing through Brunfels' life, while
Brunfels was still in the monastery, he'd taken an interest in medicinal herbs.

That interest lingered in his new life. In addition to writing about theology, he translated
medical texts from Latin into German. Then, in 1530, he began his own three-volume treatise on
herbs. To do this, he engaged a remarkable artist named Weiditz. The result is the oddest mix
of soon-to-be-outdated Galenic medicine and brilliantly accurate pictures of the plants themselves.
Brunfel's greatest contribution was a vast organization of pictorial material. The images long
outlived the words.

And so we struggled with the new idea of a shared vocabulary. Now we would all see the same
pictures, just as we'd read the Bible in our own language -- you might say the world itself
changed color.

That yesterday-today-and-tomorrow shrub, with its flowers mutating -- purple to white -- makes
fine counterpoint to its namesake. For Otto Brunfels was both painter and canvas -- both agent
and subject -- of all the changes abroad, five hundred years ago.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.

Images: Brunfels and von Hutten above are from old sources, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The corn poppy plant is from the Brunfels/Weiditz book. Below: The two photos of a
yesterday-today-and-tomorrow plant in bloom are by JHL.